Atlassian's Hypothesis for the Future of HR

According to Atlassian’s State of Teams 2026 report, while 85% of knowledge workers use AI, only 29% have changed how they work. 

Closing that gap, says Avani Solanki Prabhakar, Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at Atlassian, could be a key opportunity for HR. 

“HR is uniquely positioned to drive this change for ourselves and for the business,” says Avani. “HR can’t guide the future of work unless we reinvent our own craft first. We have to live it early, experiment with it ourselves and help organisations learn their way into new ways of working.”

By thoughtfully reorganising roles, Avani says HR leaders will be able to spend less time on administrative coordination and more time on key HR functions that can meaningfully transform business practice. 

Looking ahead, the company has shared five working hypotheses on how it believes HR will evolve over the next 12 months in a more AI-enabled workplace. 

Atlassian’s AI bet

Atlassian is testing its hypotheses over the course of the year. 

During this time, it predicts that HR will shift from managing pure headcount to managing ‘capacity,’ the mix of human and agentic workforces. But getting this balance right is crucial. 

“Over-index on automation and you erode the institutional knowledge, creativity and trust that only people provide; over-index on headcount and you lose the speed and leverage AI makes possible,” Avani says. “These aren’t tech questions; they are people questions, and they place HR in one of the most strategic positions to answer them with both heart and balance.”

To manage this, the company is testing new models for team formation and capacity planning, while also introducing skills based work allocation frameworks.

The company has also suggested that HR will increasingly be designed around outcomes, that talent programmes will become more fluid, and that data will shift from data as record to data as context. 

To test these hypotheses, Atlassian is introducing cross-functional workflow teams focused on employee journeys, testing out skills-based deployment models and bringing in personalised learning and coaching recommendations.

The role of people

Atlassian's most important HR hypothesis, however, is that the function is transforming. 

While some areas of HR can now be fully automated, Atlassian is placing more emphasis on the human element of HR. 

“As AI takes on the administrative weight – policy questions, salary prep, onboarding logistics – what remains is the work that runs on relationships,” says Avani. “Every significant organisational shift starts in ambiguity: new structures, new operating models, new ways of working that don’t yet have playbooks. 

“People don’t navigate that uncertainty by consulting a decision tree. They navigate it by trusting someone enough to think out loud, pressure-test a risky idea or admit they don’t know what comes next.”

This part of HR, Avani says, is often the reason a workflow succeeds or fails – even though it is often overlooked in automation narratives. 

To best integrate this, the company is introducing new workflows in which AI handles end-to-end administrative work, while humans still exercise human judgement. It is also bringing in manager enablement tools that use AI to build processes – such as compensation and talent review packages – with people accountable for the final call. 

“An AI can brief a manager on their team’s data, but it can’t carry forward the history of a coaching relationship or know when someone is deflecting,” says Avani. “That compounding quality is what makes the human layer durable, not overhead to be optimised away.”